father of modern lighting design, wrote the seminal
A Method of Lighting the Stage, published in 1932.
He devised a means of dividing the stage into volumes
by means of varying its intensity, colour, distribution
and control, not just for visibility’s sake but also to
manipulate mood. His method boils down to dividing
the stage into locales, each with its own background
lighting but also front-lit by two sources to the left
and right of the actors and at 45-degree angles.
These are focused horizontally on their actors’ faces,
not the stage, giving them depth but avoiding ugly
shadows. McCandless also used sources with different
colour temperatures.

Lighting two sides of an actor’s face with subtly
different hues reveals its form in a clearer way and
one that is communicable over a greater distance than
using a single colour. This method was so successful
that it can still be experienced today, in the work of
lighting designer Michael Hulls, among others. Hulls
produces stunning effects to create volumes, such as
backlighting with a cool light while using a warmer
light from the side, creating an interplay between
soft and hard light or playing with the way that the
same light can appear to warm or cool an object. It
is easy to see how a similar technique might be used
in architectural lighting to transform detail or texture
rather than changing a whole room.

But if theatrical lighting is about space it is also about
time. Control is the use of layers of light to create
a variety of effects. Often large numbers of lighting
units are used in blocks, mixing them together much as
you would combine ingredients in food. Lighting plans
are frequently huge and complex. If you were lighting
a restaurant and were to create eight lighting scenes
for a 24-hour period, you would be doing well but in a
typical three-hour show you might create 150 scenes,
all of which would have to be triggered precisely.

An audience can discern changes of one tenth ofa second in some instances. A half a second lag betweenthe music and the lighting, for example, will make thedifference between timing it right and getting it wrong,maybe, even between a hit and a flop. Yet, if you wereto take half a minute to fade between lighting scenesin a bar, people would notice it because that is too fast.I believe that when theatrical lighting designers moveinto architectural lighting they bring with them athat theatre lighting designers will havecreated gives them a huge visual libraryin the architectural lighting field’

Previous page: Howard Harrison lit the English National Ballet’s
Swan Lake, seen here at the Royal Albert Hall, London, 2016